The local library finally got this book in stock ($25! Who does McCarthy think he is? Faulkner? Melville?), so I am finally free to look at your blog again. I agree with almost all of your evaluation, except your argument that the end of the Moss family so long before the end of the book was a bad structural decision (or do I misread you?). Yes, the book falls apart after Llewelyn’s wife dies, but with that ending, it would have been just a potboiler. Still, what McCarthy gives us doesn’t fit the bill, either, and it ends up reading as if he wrote 250 pages of a gunfight and then had everyone get shot or quit so he could take a nap. My point is that the end of the Moss family wasn’t an inherently bad choice, but the execution faltered after that decision was made. A tight epilogue, like that at the end of Blood Meridian, could have done the trick better and elevated the whole.

Other complaints?

1. Chigurgh’s primary method of killing people is laughable, not terrifying. Yes, it has obvious value as a comment on his attitude toward his victims, but, as is said in one of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, as a symbol, it’s just not practical. If Chigurgh’s supposed to be a Judge Holden figure, he better have me shaking in my existential boots, not chuckling like I’m watching a bad slasher flick.

2. I felt for 250 pages of this book like I’d read it before. Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers covered this ground thirty years ago.